New Scientific Evidence Undermines Afghanistan War

Posted on September 10, 2010 by abby

FORBES– On the eve of the 9th anniversary of 9/11, support for the war in Afghanistan took a serious blow. Simultaneous press conferences were held in New York and Los Angeles to present startling new information refuting the official 9/11 narrative, used to justify the war. Also announced were three major professional groups which have joined the worldwide, and ever-growing, “9/11 Truth Movement.”

In a striking show of unity, representatives of “Scientists for 9/11 Truth,” “U.S. Military Officers for 9/11 Truth” and “Actors & Artists for 9/11 Truth” presented their findings and unveiled their eye-opening websites. Each non-profit group has launched a petition calling for a new, transparent investigation.

In NY, representing “Scientists,” Professor Niels Harrit said, “The official account put forth by NIST violates the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.” Harrit is Prof. Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen and was lead author for a 2009 peer-reviewed study that revealed evidence of high tech explosives throughout the WTC dust.

In LA, physics teacher David Chandler discussed the swift destruction of the WTC towers, including Building 7, the little-known third tower. Having demonstrated its free fall, he confronted the US government agency NIST with his analyses and forced NIST to revise its November 2008 Final Report on WTC 7. NIST’s Draft Report had claimed free fall was impossible but NIST ultimately acknowledged WTC 7 was in absolute free fall for over two seconds. Concluded Chandler, “Free fall is physically impossible without explosives.”

In LA, former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development Lt. Col. Robert Bowman stated, “9/11 has been an excuse to use our brave young troops as cannon fodder in unjust wars of aggression.” In NY, Lt. Col. Shelton Lankford, decorated fighter pilot, and USAF Accident Investigator Lt. Col. David Gapp in LA, questioned how four highly trained flight crews would all break protocol, reporting, “Not one pilot broadcast the required hijack transponder codes.”

In LA, actor John Heard asked, “How is it possible that the worst crime in U.S. history has never been properly investigated?” In NY, actor Daniel Sunjata stated, “The August 20th AP poll has revealed that only 38% of the American people support the war in Afghanistan, down from 46% in March. The question is: does this 38% know about the evidence that we have presented today?” Signatories to their petition include Ed Asner, Graham Nash, Willie Nelson, Michelle Phillips, and Gore Vidal.

The three groups at the websites below are independent, non-profit organizations calling for the reinvestigation of the September 11th attacks. These groups have no affiliation to any political party.

http://www.scientistsfor911truth.org

http://www.militaryofficersfor911truth.org

http://www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org

Photo by flickr user _lmaji_

Debating America’s Surveillance State

Posted on August 31, 2010 by abby

SALON– Earlier this month, The Cato Institute’s Unbound published my essay on America’s Surveillance State, and then invited several commentators to reply and participate in a debate of these issues. Two of those replies were particularly critical: this one from John Eastman, former Dean of the Chapman University School of Law (recent home to John Yoo), recently defeated GOP candidate for California Attorney General, and former clerk to right-wing judges Clarence Thomas and Michael Luttig; and this one from Paul Rosenzweig, a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Homeland Security official in the Bush administration.

My reply to them is now posted. As I noted, those two responses “perfectly illustrate the continuous stream of manipulative fear-mongering over the last decade which has reduced much of the American citizenry into a meek and submissive faction for whom no asserted government power is too extreme, provided the scary menace of ‘Terrorism’ is uttered to justify it.” For that reason, I think the discussion is quite instructive.

* * * * *

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE THRIVES ON FEAR

I’m particularly appreciative of the responses to my initial essay by John Eastman and Paul Rosenzweig. Those two replies — especially the former — perfectly illustrate the continuous stream of manipulative fear-mongering over the last decade which has reduced much of the American citizenry into a meek and submissive faction for whom no asserted government power is too extreme, provided the scary menace of “Terrorism” is uttered to justify it.

That more-surveillance-is-always-better mentality is what allows Eastman and Rosenzweig to dismiss concerns over surveillance excesses a mere four weeks after the establishment-supporting Washington Post documented that our Surveillance State is “so large, so unwieldy and so secretive” that not even top intelligence and defense officials know what it does. For those who are so fearful of Terrorism and/or so authoritarian in their desire to exploit and exaggerate that threat for greater government power, not even the construction of a “Top Secret America” — “an alternative geography of the United States” that operates in the dark and with virtually no oversight — is cause for concern.

Eastman’s essay centers around one three-word slogan: We‘re at war! For almost a full decade, this has been the all-justifying cliché for everything the U.S. Government does — from torture, renditions and due-process-free imprisonments to wars of aggression, occupations, assassination programs aimed at U.S. citizens and illegal domestic eavesdropping. Thus does Eastman thunder, with the melodrama and hysteria typical of this scare tactic: “Not once in his article does Greenwald even acknowledge that we are at war with a global enemy bent on destroying us.” A global enemy bent on destroying us! Scary: be very afraid.

By invoking The War Justification for America’s Surveillance State, Eastman wants to trigger images of America’s past glorious wars. He’s not particularly subtle about that, as he begins with a charming story of how his grandfather’s letters were censored during World War I (how censorship of a soldier deployed in a foreign war justifies surveillance of American civilians on U.S. soil is anyone’s guess). But, for several reasons, this war justification is as misleading as it is dangerous:

Continue reading about America’s Surveillance State.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

Big Brother is Already Searching You

Posted on August 27, 2010 by abby

COMPUTER WORLD– While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Here’s what the Fourth Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The spirit of and the letter of this amendment is that government agencies are not allowed to go on hunting expeditions looking for violations or transgressions. If government officials want to search your property, they have to demonstrate good reason why they suspect you of committing a crime.

Let’s say a small town wanted to crack down on swimming pool permit violations. If local police went house to house, telling people they were going to look for swimming pools in everybody’s backyards, nobody would accept this because it would clearly violate the Fourth Amendment. However, if you do exactly the same thing using cameras in space, it’s somehow OK.

The town of Riverhead on Long Island used Google Earth to search all back yards in the town for illegal swimming pools.

They found about 250 pools built without permits and collected about $75,000 in fines. Critics say they did it for the money, but city officials said they’re concerned mainly about safety.

There’s no such ambiguity in Greece. Greek officials are spotting undeclared swimming pools — and they’re definitely doing it for the money. Faced with a budget crunch, Greece’s government is using Google Earth to hunt for swimming pools, giving officials a justification for collecting extra taxes.

The idea is this: Hey, we need more money. Let’s go find some.

The Greece example is similar in that respect to the use of Google Earth in the U.K. by fish thieves. In at least 12 documented cases, exotic-fish thieves used Google Earth to find backyard ponds. The crooks broke into the yards and stole expensive live fish that they intended to sell for big bucks.

The purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to prevent the U.S. government from doing what Greece’s government is doing, which is essentially what U.K. fish thieves are doing: Using arbitrary searches to hunt for opportunities to take something away from people.

Here’s the problem. If one town sets a precedent that’s it’s OK to violate Fourth Amendment protections as long as you use satellite imagery, then any government can do the same for any reason. And the technologies and methods for doing so are becoming very sophisticated.

A company called Remote Sensing Metrics is buying satellite pictures from privately owned satellite photography companies including DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, then it’s using those images to count cars in Wal-Mart parking lots and selling analysis of the data to hedge funds and other analysts. They’re selling it as a package discreetly billed as “satellite parking lot fill rate analysis.”

Other firms are monitoring crops to better predict commodity pricing for wheat, corn and so on.

The New York Police Department already uses satellite imagery to fight crime. It tracks crimes, looks for clusters where many crimes are occurring together and then floods those locations with police officers.

Those all sound like legitimate and creative uses for new technology. But where is it all going?

Once you combine all-seeing satellite imagery with sophisticated computerized number-crunching, you end up with massive potential for abuse — especially by government agencies.

One might imagine a dystopian future where automated systems constantly scan every house in the country to find all kinds of things, from heat escaping the house to backyard barbecues or the number of people coming and going from every house.

It’s the ol’ slippery slope argument, but it must be taken seriously. If it’s OK for municipal officials to peek into every backyard in Riverhead to find a handful of pool-permit violators, why would it not be acceptable for other agencies to look at all homes and businesses in the nation for a much wider variety of potential violations?

And if it’s OK to do that using satellite imagery, what about using other technologies?

A company called American Science and Engineering sells a high-end, tricked-out security vehicle called the Z Backscatter Van. Its sole purpose, if used by government agencies, is to violate the Fourth Amendment.

The van sits there by the side of the road and X-rays cars passing by. It’s like a full-body scan at the airport, but for cars. The manufacturer brags about the fact that the van keeps a “low profile.” The Web site says: “The system is unobtrusive, as it maintains the outward appearance of an ordinary van.”

What the van does is conduct unreasonable searches without probable cause and without the knowledge of the person who owns the property being searched. That’s its only function.

American Science and Engineering would no doubt argue that it’s selling the van to private companies, which raises yet another question. Is it acceptable for private companies to engage in activity that would be a Fourth Amendment violation if it were done by a government agency?

Private security companies can’t search your home without a warrant, and they can’t pull you over and search your car. So why can they search your car with an X-ray scanner?

Within a few years, we’ll have technology that can see through walls on a large scale. We’ll be able to feed the data into supercomputers and get information about trends and other analysis.

We need to figure out what’s OK and what isn’t. The first step is to apply the Fourth Amendment to searches conducted without probable cause via Google Earth.

Riverhead officials should be forced to give back all fees collected for unpermitted swimming pools, for example, and banned from future hunting expeditions.

Technology should not be used to exempt government agencies from the Constitution. Unfortunately, technology empowers governments to violate our rights with ruthless efficiency.

I wonder if satellites can detect America’s Founding Fathers rolling over in their graves?

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. Contact Mike at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @mike_elgan, or read his blog, The Raw Feed.

The Pont-Saint-Esprit Poisoning: Did the CIA Spread LSD?

Posted on August 24, 2010 by abby

BBC– Nearly 60 years ago, a French town was hit by a sudden outbreak of hallucinations, which left five people dead and many seriously ill. For years it was blamed on bread contaminated with a psychedelic fungus – but that theory is now being challenged.

On 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.

“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he remembers.

Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon.

He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.

“Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly… screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down… the noise was terrible.

“I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”

Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms.

Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town’s bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.

Biological warfare

That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD.

David Belin, meanwhile, was executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in 1975 to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the CIA.

Albarelli believes the Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show – if they had not been “buried” – that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD.

Continue reading about the Pont-Saint-Esprit Poisoning: Did the CIA Spread LSD?

Writtnen by Mike Thomson

Gulf Oil Spill: White House Accused of Spinning Report

Posted on August 20, 2010 by abby

GUARDIAN– The White House was accused today of spinning a government scientific report into the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill which had officials declaring that the vast majority of the oil had been removed.

As BP workers finished pouring cement into the well as a first step to permanently sealing it today, environmental groups and scientists – including those working with government agencies to calculate the scale and effects of the spill – said White House officials had painted far too optimistic a picture of a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) into the fate of the oil.

“Recent reports seem to say that about 75% of the oil is taken care of and that is just not true,” said John Kessler, of Texas A&M University, who led a National Science Foundation on-site study of the spill. “The fact is that 50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water. It’s just in a dissolved or dispersed form.”

With work progressing on the final phase of the “static kill” sealing of the well, Thad Allen, the Obama administration’s top official on the spill, told reporters there would be no new oil in the Gulf.

But those assurances failed to satisfy scientists and environmental groups, who disputed the claim by Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate adviser, that “the vast majority of oil is gone”.

In Louisiana, state wildlife officials told CNN that tar balls and patches of oil were still washing up in the marshes and coastal areas of St Bernard, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes.

Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, said the White House had been too quick to declare the oil was gone. “The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50% of it is still in the water,” she said.

Continue reading at GUARDIAN.

photo by Deepwater Horizon Response/Flickr

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